


Awake for ever in a sweet unrest

by perfectlight



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, a lot of other Claras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlight/pseuds/perfectlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>My impossible girl,</em> he called her, but Clara was not singular, not anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awake for ever in a sweet unrest

**_Awake for ever in a sweet unrest_ **   


Sometimes the knowledge of all she had seen swelled up inside her like music, or a scream, and made her want to split and crack and stream out with light and fury like she knew the Doctor had done. There were whole lives, whole worlds, centuries and millennia and galaxies that swarmed and crowded in her head, leaving behind trails of stars on her neurons, sweeping sparkling arches of nebulas over lobes of grey matter. 

 

This planet, this Earth, was so small that Clara feared for it, feared it could be lost as the universe shifted and roiled, be lost or forgotten or broken, like any one of the pencils or books she had lost in this childhood. Clara couldn’t quite count the lives she’d had on Earth – there was this one, her first one, the life from the leaf, spinning on the wind and swirling out across the universe, brushing the faces of everyone she had also become. But there were so many more, before and after and _after_ , and Earth faded as humanity fled and then forgot and though she was not always human, it was always Earth that drew her. 

 

But Clara knew Earth would not always be enough for humans; and sometimes she stood absolutely still and stared around at the people milling and bustling, lives like sparks blown out so quickly, with smoke that faded from memory so soon it made her want to cry – stood and stared and knew that one day the great-grandchildren of their great-grandchildren would leave this planet and let it die in light and fire, just as she’d seen, move out across the stars and pay no mind to the green-blue world they’d been born upon. _Dust to dust,_ Clara thinks, but they had all been stardust before, and would sink into stardust again – humanity, and Merry, and everything else that had been or would be, and Earth would be forgotten. 

 

Clara wondered if the Doctor had seen that time, that time of dust and shadow, and whether it made the times of life and light seem as hollow and pale as they did to her.

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you remember?” the Doctor had asked, wariness and worry creasing his face until he very nearly looked his age (or maybe he always had and Clara just couldn’t see it before; but now when she looked at the Doctor she thought she could see the shadow of his other faces, future and past, lurking vaguely just behind the thin veneer of skin). “Do you remember those other lives, the other yous?”

 

Clara’s eyes had wandered away from him of their own accord and drifted across the TARDIS (the TARDIS had so many faces, too, and when she blinked Clara thought she saw the shadow of ivy and vines creeping across its echoing walls). There was a fullness inside of her, pushing in her mind, and she could feel that something else was there, but couldn’t quite pin down what. Even thinking of it made lights flash before her eyes, glowing and glaring in a thousand nameless hues, stretching and sweeping like the long arms of galaxies or pale woven threads of irises. It made the world bend and weave before her, and Clara sucked in a breath. Faces and sounds lurked in the shadowed edges of her mind, but wandering there could make her lose herself again. So at first, Clara had clung to the leaf.

 

“A bit, I suppose,” she’d finally managed, her voice a low murmur. Without realizing, Clara had leaned against the TARDIS console for support, and the low thrum that the old girl sent towards her was comforting, somehow. “Funny little things. Feelings for people I don’t remember, weird clothes and smells. You,” she added as an afterthought, because if there was a single constant in the shattered, scattered fragments of Clara, it was the Doctor. Saving the Doctor. Loving the Doctor, even, in the way she supposed everyone who travelled with him had fallen in love in the end. 

 

The Doctor’s eyes held unswervingly, and he did not seem to breathe. She wondered, then, how many Claras he remembered, and if he thought he’d killed them all.

 

* * *

 

 

_She was born at eventide while the rest of them ran. Everything the woman who birthed her knew had vanished into ash and smoke; all the girl ever knew was shadow, and stories of a sky. The woman died before the girl was old enough to be named, as the ships sank down from the sky and poured out burning lights. Groups of wanderers and escapees took her in, passed her like a bundle to be carried on a back as they crept through the deepest winding tunnels far below their planet’s surface, and never looked back when bodies fell. So far above the ships mined their surface, and sometimes the quiver of faraway augers spread even to the rock that ensconced them; in fascination, the girl would press one molded ear to a smooth patch of rock and marvel, crooking her fingers over the pale, winding seams of glowing stone the ships had come there for. To trade, some had said; to eat, to worship, said others; but as the tunnels sank deeper and pinched around them, the survivors forgot to care._

 

_The girl grew to a woman; on the day of rockfall her legs were crushed, so she lay beside twisted bodies and beneath spears of stone and wondered, again, of the stars. Great noise pierced the dust, and the woman thought it was rockfall again and welcomed an end to pain, but instead it was something large and deepest blue, riddled with squares of pouring light that shone brighter than any winding seam. The man stepping from it was wrapped in black and had skin impossibly soft, malleable as wax; his hand in hers, strange words that rang and shivered in the air instead of sinking into her mind, he had not saved her world or any of the worlds, but he could save her, he would. A voice that shook like distant augers; liquid in his eyes. The tremors of another quake shook through her bones, and it was her scream that warned the man to run for his square of endless light before the planet collapsed around them; he did._

 

The world was too bright that morning, the sun an anomaly, the shifting air a marvel. Some school project brought the children to the park with Clara in tow; as they squabbled and ran about, she wrapped her fingers around a stone and held it to her ear. It was still. 

 

* * *

 

 

Almost every one of her million pieces had also been called Clara; it was a comfort, somehow, to know she’d held that shard of herself no matter where she landed. Even the most ancient piece of her, the one from the planet of red skies and mountains Clara only dreamed of in the TARDIS, the one who died in a war that was somehow everywhere then nowhere – even her name, long and swooping all in a rush from her tongue like forest wind, had meant something quite close to _clear and bright_. Clara never asked the Doctor about that planet, but sometimes seeing deep red or gold made the memory of rhythm pulse faintly beneath her ribs on the right, and very rarely, if Clara let her thoughts fade back into a calm grey fog on the edge of daydreams, the loops of winding circles she always traced idly into margins of receipts or recipe books almost seemed to form a pattern, a twining layer of circles that pushed vaguely against her fingertips, waiting to be woven.

 

_I don’t know where I am_ , Clara would think when they awoke upon strange planets on their longer adventures; even if she quickly recalled that they were on Eilt or Arcadia or Sinda Callesta, the panic that reared up in her chest took longer to fall than it had to rise, and the lights that pounded before her eyes would try to sink into the shape of stars she shouldn’t know, galaxies she hadn’t seen. Once Clara had awoken screaming from a dream of a metal shell trapping her body, a dream that ended in fire and blackness, like so many of them had. 

 

_Time travel has always been possible in dreams,_ Vastra had told her, and now Clara understood why.

 

* * *

 

 

_They called her Kalare, and it meant star-shine on winter frost; a brightness all its own, even on a planet without colour. Long dead, Kalare was recalled only in patches: arms wound in furs that smelled of soft things she couldn’t name lifting her into a hanging bunk when she was a very little girl; the bitter-sharp taste of a fruit that was cool to touch but spread fingers of warmth throughout her when she placed it in her mouth; a forest of ice, with branches stretching and winding, clinging to glimmers of colorless starlight when it sparked through the pale trees._

 

_Then snow had swirled around a great box, limbs of ice had rattled and when the world settled there was a man with thorny hair stepping from a box whose surface was something Kalare could not name, something lighter than shadow and deeper than ice, and she’d called it_ glásti, _impossible. And when the storm came pouring down from the hills, and the ice began to splinter at the wailing of the wind, and spears of branches and leaves and flowers shattered down around the clever glásti man who’d made light beam from a stick, Kalare screamed for him to run,_ chleál, _and felt the warmth of the blood seep past her furs before the pain of a frozen bough through her back made her fall into the wind, through the snow, and the world thrummed as the blue faded and the glásti man was gone_.

 

A vague dream, a splintered memory, but even so, Clara woke that morning with a sharp pain in her chest that made her nervous and wheezy; even Angie could see the dread crinkling Clara’s face and asked, “What’s the matter with you?”

 

_Wrong me_ , Clara had thought, as she put the kettle on.

 

* * *

 

 

_My impossible girl_ , he called her, but Clara was not singular, not anymore. Some days she could hold the earth, could keep the kids sorted and slip off with her madman to chase the stars; but some days she was still blowing, and could not land at all – some days her mind was not her own and reality shattered against what had been and what would be – she _remembered_ –

 

_– impossible clouds, a flare of intoxicating joy, metal pressed against her palm – and then falling, falling in a whirl of silks and starlight, and still she fell even after her body shattered and woke and then wrapped itself in darkness, and dust turned to gold and she was falling again and tearing to pieces that spun across everything and everywhere –_

 

* * *

 

 

“Clara. _Clara_.” A hand on her shoulder, shaking it until she stumbled from sleep, blinked into her own mind. The Doctor, pale brows knitted, silhouetted by the arching shelves of the TARDIS’s overcompensating library. Whose chaise lounges were too comfortable to be fair to sleepy time travellers; _Summer Falls_ had slipped from Clara’s lap and landed neatly by her shoes. 

 

“What?” A grumble; she ground her palms against her eyes, started to push herself up and thought it not worth the effort.

 

"You were dreaming," the Doctor told her, and though Clara's face is tipped down and away, she can see his face before her eyes as clearly as infinity. "You didn't sound happy."

 

_I’m not happy_. Faces billowing, simmering stars; her mind was filled with mirrors for a thousand different lives. Clara fought against the light. 

 

_Run, remember. Always dust. Let me save you._

 

“Do you remember?” the Doctor asked again, as Clara wavered like a leaf and thought of dimensions of time, forests of ice, names in the margins, and wondered why her present should be any realer than one of her pasts, one of her memories of the future. It had happened, and would happen, and no matter where a single Doctor’s _glásti_ box took her, Clara did not think she would ever escape the endless fog of her ghosts.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from _Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art_ by John Keats.


End file.
